Microsoft Corp must turn over a customer’s emails and other account information stored in a data center in Ireland to the U.S. government, a judge ruled on Thursday, in a case that has drawn concern from privacy groups and major technology companies.
Microsoft and other U.S. companies had challenged the warrant, arguing it improperly extended the authority of federal prosecutors to seize customer information held in foreign countries.
Following a two-hour court hearing in New York, U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska said a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge required the company to hand over any data it controlled, regardless of where it was stored.
“It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,” Preska said.

Actually that’s a fairly tricky area and one with all sorts of subtleties, even if none of the parties are trying to act evil. The nature of online services and multinationals means you can have a customer in Ireland being supplied with a service by a company in the UK, with headquarters in Germany, but customer information stored in datacentres in the US and the Netherlands. Trying to figure out which data protection and data retention laws to comply with keeps lots of lawyers in business.

Even on a small scale it’s easy to get into knots. If you use offsite cloud backups, or even Dropbox, you can easily end up with data sitting in multiple jurisdictions, possibly without even knowing it.

I remember raising this very issue with a senior official in DoJ when the Data Retention Act was being drafted. He just shrugged his shoulders and told me we (industry) would just have to sort it out.

In fact even in Ireland you can get into this mess. At present I am involved in a process of clarifying a point with the ODPC where one (Irish) law says I must delete a piece of data and another one says I cannot delete it. No-one knows what to do.

A federal judge is mulling whether to hold Microsoft in contempt of court for defying orders to give the US government e-mails stored on an overseas server.

The case is the nation’s first testing the Obama administration’s position that any company with operations in the US must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. The US believes the e-mail on a Microsoft server in Dublin, Ireland is associated with narcotics trafficking.

Microsoft on Tuesday reiterated its position that it was talking with US District Judge Loretta Preska, the judge who sided with the Obama administration on Friday. “We will not be turning over the e-mail,” Microsoft said in a statement.

…

The Justice Department said that global jurisdiction is necessary in an age when “electronic communications are used extensively by criminals of all types in the United States and abroad, from fraudsters to hackers to drug dealers, in furtherance of violations of US law.”

(Reuters) - The U.S. government in 2008 threatened to fine Yahoo Inc $250,000 a day if it failed to turn over customer data to intelligence agencies, according to documents unsealed on Thursday.

The documents shed new light on how the government dealt with U.S. Internet companies that were reluctant to comply with orders from the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rules on government requests to conduct surveillance for national security issues.

Yahoo lost the battle, which experts say helped pave the way for the Prism surveillance program revealed last summer by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.

Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time – on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.

What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn’t notice Sony’s rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn’t one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn’t notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we’re paying those companies to detect – especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich’s discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case.

According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.

During the 20th century, scientists developed so-called ABC weapons – atomic, biological and chemical. It took decades before their deployment could be regulated and, at least partly, outlawed. New digital weapons have now been developed for the war on the Internet. But there are almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D weapons, and the only law that applies is the survival of the fittest.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw these developments decades ago.In 1970, he wrote, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” That’s precisely the reality that spies are preparing for today.

The US Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force have already established their own cyber forces, but it is the NSA, also officially a military agency, that is taking the lead. It’s no coincidence that the director of the NSA also serves as the head of the US Cyber Command. The country’s leading data spy, Admiral Michael Rogers, is also its chief cyber warrior and his close to 40,000 employees are responsible for both digital spying and destructive network attacks.

*Editor’s note: Barrett Brown has been incarcerated since September 2012. On January 22, he was sentenced to a total of 63 months in prison and ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution. Go here to read earlier installments of “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” If you’d like to send him something, he is currently being held in the Kaufman County jail, though in coming weeks he will eventually be transferred to a federal facility. As he mentioned, don’t send him anything typed or printed or photocopied, because he won’t get it.
*
Barrett Brown, No. 45047-177
Kaufman Law Enforcement Center
P.O. Box 849
Kaufman, TX 75142

This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed –** is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act**, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.

The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?

Yes - it used trusted certificates to do this - the software that could easily be hacked used certificates that were valid. There’ve been a few more of these valid certs malwares, and there’s a new one that uses stolen certs: theregister.co.uk/2015/06/15 … conn_cert/

All of which threatens to bring the rather dodgy edifice of certs tumbling down…